


What they seem

by Lilliburlero



Category: Henry V - Shakespeare, Othello - Shakespeare
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Homophobia, Misogyny, Pre-Canon, Racism, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 18:53:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13840899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: A Captain and an Ensign (acting) walk into a bar...*Note: racism, mainly of the fetishising sort, internalised homophobia, misogyny, suicide references.





	What they seem

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reconditarmonia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/gifts).



The Englishman spoke a strange sort of Venetian, peppered with schoolmasterly Tuscanisms, but the two of them could not, they soon discovered, make themselves intelligible in any other language. Also he swore a good deal, not in the foul, careless way of soldiers who pile oaths into their gapped mouths as they do corpses into a breached defence, but as if he were truly affirming his Christianity, and trying to convince you of it too. Iago knew only one other who swore so, and he was the man he loved best in the world, so it comforted him.

‘I’m a lazy dog, to speak in my mother tongue—mother indeed, for it’s the Venetian of bawds, not secretaries—when I don’t know a word of yours. No—hang on. Le fout— _foutrebol_.’ 

The other’s broad, thin-lipped mouth turned down in mock alarm. It made his alert, lynx-like features strangely attractive, but no, full lips were best. 

‘Have I got it wrong? You know—when you fellows blow up a pig's bladder,’ Iago mimed this, feeling slightly foolish, ‘and kick it about the streets, and each other’s teeth in too, most times.’ 

‘Oh.’ The Englishman took a decorous sip of the sharp Badacsony wine. ‘That is not my game, Jesu. I am a gentleman, though a very poor one, that must sell his sword to feed his belly. A squire of the starving mountain, one might say. And, more pertinent and apropos, not my language. I had Latin and French before I had English, but neither of those is my natal tongue.’ 

Iago was nonplussed. He knew that Englishmen of rank still spoke French from the cradle, but neither did they scorn the language of the peasantry. Even the late English King (for whom Iago had once stood as part of a guard of honour, out at Portogruaro, not long after he’d joined up, though in those days the late King of England was not a king, but a king’s cousin only, with disappointing raw scurf on the back of his neck) was said to conduct much of his business in it. 

‘You talk in riddles, sir,’ Iago said, piqued by the other’s mention of his gentle birth, and suddenly unsure of his own presumption that as an acting ensign in the direct service of the Venetian state, not a contracted mercenary, he outranked him. The man was smiling, his deep-set eyes like inverted crescent moons behind hazy cloud. Iago knew him instantly and incontrovertibly for a man of his own temper, and it might be diverting enough for one night—but no, big eyes were best, slightly protuberant, and the whites shining with trustful valour. 

‘No, by my faith, I am not meaning to be a species of conundrum. Just a Welshman.’ 

‘Ah, yes. I see.’ Iago did not really see. He knew that on that remote ultimate island there were English and Scots, and they were bitter enemies, and of the Welsh too he had heard, but he had supposed the differences between them all something less than those between Venetians and Florentines. And yet he himself was a Florentine sort of Venetian, if you looked at it from a certain angle. A satirical voice, he knew not quite from whence, sounded in his ear: _Aye, the excellent aspect of a noose strung from the transom beam_. The noose over the transom was why he had courted Emilia, and it was all going well, he would return to her not an acting, but a full ensign, and they would be wed. A soldier should be married: he could do what he liked then. On that point he disagreed with—with _Him_ , who always said it was not fair to the girl, if you were on active service. Being killed was one thing, but what if you came back maimed, unable to do your duty to her? ‘So,’ Iago resumed, shuddering slightly, ‘you’re going back to—’ he realised he had no idea what the word for Welshmanland was, ‘you’re going home, now this treaty with Sigismund is signed?’ 

The slatternly proprietress sidled over. She lifted the empty jug and made the universal signal for _same again_? Iago shrugged assent: they had their pay and nothing else to do. 

‘If you can call it home, you see.’ 

That was interesting—well, it was the prelude to a tale. Which might be interesting, or useful, or both, or neither. 

‘Oh. Why did you leave in the first place?’ 

‘A kinsman of mine got a—a wasp in his hat, you understand.’ 

‘A—a _what_?’ 

‘Jesu—I know not the word. A—yes, a fancy. A notion. An idea that is fixed. Buzz buzz, you know.’ He made a circular motion in the iron-coloured wool at his temple. ‘You see, there was fellow called de Grey—’ 

It proved neither an interesting nor a useful tale, and as he drank, Iago’s attention wandered to the pretty face two benches over, who was probably rent; to Emilia's portion, that would clear his debts, set him up respectably in a commission; finally to _Him_ , who would be disgusted if he knew, but he would never know. To _Him_ he would always be kind Iago, valiant Iago, sweet Iago, _honest_ Iago. He must never know. The Welshman’s speech, thankfully, began to take on a terminating cadence. 

‘—and to put it to you with the utmost brevity, as our Blessed Virgin Mother is my witness, I could not join with Owain in rank rebellion against the greased and oily head of a monarch, but yet neither could I fight for a man—a king I should say, whose great-grandfathers dispossessed mine. So I went abroad, see you here.’ 

‘But you will fight for the son of a man whose great-grandfathers dispossessed yours. How comes that?’ 

‘Ah, but look, we will fight in France, and for France, and that has made all the difference.’ 

Iago did not see how. Either you fought for a man you loved or you fought against him, the _cause_ —well, the cause was for the Brass to worry about. He tried to imagine how he would feel about the thing if—if _He_ had dispossessed his great-grandfathers. But Iago’s grandfathers had been respectively a muleteer and a pedlar, his great-grandfathers lost to living memory. Anyway that was the wonderful thing about Him, He was, to all intents and purposes, as much without antecedents as the merest new recruit. He had them, of course, and Iago had heard Him, in His soft, beguiling storytelling voice, recite some of their genealogies, but in their blackness and Moorishness they made no sense to Christendom. And so He was no better than a muleteer’s grandson, a bawd’s whelp. Except in honour. But what was honour? Men who had it after the battle on Monday might die shrieking from the pain of a rotten wound on Wednesday, and be forgotten in the clay on Friday. It was just a word. A symbol. A mere—a mere—thingy. One of those coats of arms they hung up above doorways, like nooses. 

The Welshman was tapping the board in front of Iago's downcast eyes. ‘There, there it is now—there is twelvepence for them—’ 

‘For what? I think the bill will be a bit more than that, mate, sorry. This place is a rip-off joint, but it’s convenient to camp, and you can be relatively sure the locals are friendly—and clean—’ 

‘No—I meant, it is a saying we have, by Our Lady. For your thoughts, look to it, you see.’ He banged his own skull in illustration; it sounded like it was made of solid oak. 

‘Oh, yeah, I get you. Sorry. Yeah. In a world of my own. Where were we?’ 

‘I was returning of your question, see how it is? Whether you also are going home.’ 

‘Ah, yeah.’ He cleared his throat. This was the point, he supposed, at which he had to declare himself. Or not. He reappraised the man’s weathered, agreeable face, broad shoulders and compact torso, the hard, capable-looking hands, with their cracked, clean fingernails. All the signs pointed to a more than tolerable, discreet fuck, why the hell not? 

‘Mm. Yeah. Just waiting for the order. It’s good, you know. I’m in line for a promotion, and it means my girl and I can get married at last. The grief she’s been giving me, you just wouldn’t bloody believe—’ 

The Welshman’s fallen face was at least as satisfying as a handjob. At least. ( _You go on telling yourself that, Iago, my boy,_ said the satirical voice, and he identified it as Signior Brabantio’s—that old fucking ponce, who back in the day—well, never mind that.) 

‘Oh—I wouldn’t have thought—' 

Iago took half a cup of wine at a gulp, and regretted it—the stuff seared a vitriolic path down his throat, and he hiccupped. ‘What? What didn’t you fucking think?’ 

‘You didn’t strike me—look here, Jesu, I didn’t mean anything by it. Married to the job, I suppose. Like myself.’ 

‘Yeah, well. I’d rather have something a bit softer and warmer to stick my cock into than the mouth of one of those hellfire guns.’ He gave an appalling pastiche of the tolerant average man’s live-and-let-live smile. How did the Welshman not clock it for a fraud? For that matter, how many times had he, he himself, Iago, been on the receiving end of the pastiche, and not the real, tolerant, average thing? He hadn't a fucking clue, and any man who told you he knew was a liar. 

‘Wouldn’t we all,’ the other said mildly, raising a cup still decorously full. 

Iago blinked hard, and still saw the grotty, sticky little bar-room under his eyelids, just with the lighting reversed. What was dark was bright, what white, black. He had to get out of here. He stood up and threw one leg awkwardly over the bench, put out his hand. 

‘Be seeing you, mate. I’m sorry, really fucking sorry, but I didn’t fucking catch your name. I’m Iago.’ 

The Welshman’s palm was as rough, warm, and impersonal as the most satisfying sort of wank. He made a noise that sounded like someone discreetly blowing his nose, then spitting, in an echoey room. 

‘Nice to er, nice to meet you,’ Iago said, none the wiser. The man’s rueful parting smile made him wish he’d listened more attentively to his tale. The story of a strange local feud coming to abet outright civil broil in a barbarian land was just the sort of thing that _He_ was captivated by, that would make Him sit content and quizzical before the fire, the more likely to touch Iago’s forearms in inquiry, punch his shoulder in congratulation, joshingly kiss the crown of his head. But, he thought, shoving his way through the crowds of off-duty men and camp-following girls, what you know you know, and what you don’t, you don’t. That was just how it was.

**Author's Note:**

> Title: Othello, III, iii
> 
> More-than-Shakespearean liberties have been taken with chronology throughout.
> 
> 'for whom Iago had once stood as part of a guard of honour, out at Portogruaro': the future Henry IV visited Venice in 1392.
> 
> 'And yet he himself was a Florentine sort of Venetian, if you looked it at from a certain angle. A satirical voice, he knew not quite from whence, sounded in his ear, _Aye, the excellent aspect of a noose strung from the transom beam_.': Dante records an epidemic of suicides in Florence in his own time, I've take the liberty of extending it into the early 15th century. Florence had a thriving gay culture in the Renaissance and became a European byword for homosexuality.
> 
> 'a fellow called de Grey': the murky origins of Owain Glyn Dŵr's insurrection involve a dispute with Reginald Grey, a powerful marcher baron.


End file.
